Ancestral Roofs

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Bright spot

I turned off Moira Road onto Carson Road (which led to a brush with Fuller a few clicks on) the better to park and have a good look at the 1854 Wesleyan church, now the community centre.

As I was about to turn into the parking lot, something drew my attention. Like the bright flash of an oriole in the forest canopy, this eye-catching place, well, caught my eye.

I first noticed the shadows cast by impressive cornice mouldings above doors and windows on the neat symmetrical front of this clapboard house. Although the house is well-screened with bushes (it would be invisible in summer) I saw enough to make me fall in love.

Pilasters with capitals flanked the blind panelled sidelights, and the oversized Regency windows with their panelled dado below. Deep roof cornices lead to returning eaves on the side elevation. Then an Italianate front door.

And all picked out in wonderful cream and gold, with a dusky blue highlights and roof.

The proportions, and the wide roof cornice lead me to think it's an early house. The wealth of detail on the front, with some vernacular treatment, have me puzzled. The house actually makes me think of some of the richly moulded frame houses of Lunenburg or Mahone Bay.

I checked the Belden's 1878 atlas. There's a D. Vanderwater listed at Concession III Lot 13; I think this house may lie on part of that lot. The Ketcheson's were among the first settlers in the area. Could well be a very early house. Hope someone at Moira's Facebook sees this query and puts me out of my misery!

3 comments:

House was built in 1834 we lived there for 15 years and stripped most of the woodwork on the front down before painting it those bright colours. Did a fair amount of restoration on the inside. It was baby blue when we moved in!!

Great Architecture quotes

"The sins of the Architect are permanent sins" Frank Lloyd Wright, 1914

"In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." ~Baba Dioum, Senegalese poet (Posted in January on the ACO Acorn online)

"It is forbidden to disfigure external decorations on private buildings through modern additions and to spoil historic buildings in an important town out of avarice and the desire to make money." - Theodosius, Valentinianus, Arcadius (309 A.D.)

"It has been said that at its best, preservation engages the past in a conversation with the present over a mutual concern for the future" - William Murtagh (1988)

"Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact". - John Kenneth Galbraith (1979)

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines" - Frank Lloyd Wright

"Architecture is the art of how to waste space" - Philip Johnson

"Architecture is frozen music" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Photo Gallery

"Caught in passing"

Striker/Walmsley House 1868

Albert Street beauty

Fort William Collegiate Institute - "they don't make 'em like they used to"